Actual Division of the Sentence

Vilém Mathesius was the first to describe the informative value of different parts of the sentence in the actual process of communication, making the informative perspective of an utterance and showing which component of the denoted situation is informationally more important from the point of view of the speaker. By analogy with the grammatical, or nominative division of the sentence the idea of the so-called “ actual division ” of the sentence was put forward. This linguistic theory is known as the functional analysis of the sentence, the communicative analysis, the actual division analysis, or the informative perspective analysis. In his papers V. Mathesius introduced the idea that the formal analysis of a sentence (subject and predicate – a static phenomenon) should be distinguished from the functional analysis of a sentence (‘what is being talked about’ and ‘what is being said about it’ – which is a dynamic phenomenon, changing in the very act of communication).

The main components of the actual division of a sentence are the theme and the rheme. The theme (originally called “ the basis ” by V. Mathesius) is the starting point of communication, a thing or a phenomenon about which something is reported in the sentence; it usually contains some old, “already known” information. The rheme (originally called “ the nucleus ” by V. Mathesius) is the basic informative part of the sentence, its contextually relevant communicative center, the “peak” of communication, or the information reported about the theme; it usually contains some new information.

The theme of the actual division of the sentence may or may not coincide with the subject of the sentence. The rheme of the actual division, in its turn, may or may not coincide with the predicate of the sentence — either with the whole predicate group or its part, such as the predicative, the object, the adverbial.

In some sentences, the rheme may be expressed by the subject and it may precede the theme, which is expressed by the predicate, e.g.: Who is late today? – Charlie (rheme) is late (theme). This type of actual division is called “ inverted ”, “ reverse ”, “ specialized ”, or “ marked ”. The actual division of the sentence finds its full expression only in a concrete context of speech (therefore it is sometimes referred to as the “contextual” division of the sentence).

The close connection of the actual division of the sentence with the context, which makes it possible to divide the informative parts of the communication into those “already known” by the listener and those “not yet known”, does not mean that the actual division is a purely semantic factor. There are special formal lingual means of expressing the distinction between the meaningful center of the utterance, the rheme, and the starting point of its content, the theme. They are as follows: word order patterns, constructions with introducers, syntactic patterns of contrastive complexes, constructions with articles and other determiners, constructions with intensifying particles, and intonation contours.

The connection between word order and actual division has been described above: direct actual division usually means that the theme coincides with the subject in the syntactic structure of the sentence, while the rheme coincides with the predicate. Inverted word order can indicate inverted actual division, though the correlation is not obligatory, e. g.: There was a box.

Inside the box was a microphone.

The adverbial modifier of place at the beginning of the sentence expresses the theme, while the subject at the end of the utterance is the rheme; the word order in this sentence is inverted, though its actual division is direct. Reversed order of actual division, i.e. the positioning of the rheme at the beginning of the sentence, is connected with emphatic speech, e.g.: Off you go! What a nice little girl she is!

Constructions with the introducer there identify the subject of the sentence as the rheme, while the theme (usually it is an adverbial modifier of place) is shifted to the end of the utterance, e.g.: There is a book on the table.

The actual division of such sentences is reverse without any emotive connotations expressed. Cf.: The book is on the table.

In this sentence both the word order and the actual division are direct: the subject is the theme of the sentence. Emphatic identification of the rheme expressed by various nominative parts of the sentence (except for the predicate) is achieved by constructions with the anticipatory it, e.g.:

It is Charlie who is late.

It was back in 1895 that Popov invented radio.

The major lingual means of actual division of the sentence is intonation, especially the stress which identifies the rheme; it is traditionally defined as “ logical accent ” or “ rhematic accent ”. Intonation is universal and inseparable from the other means of actual division described above, especially from word-order patterns: in cases of direct actual division (which make up the majority of sentences) the logical stress is focused on the last notional word in the sentence in the predicate group, identifying it as the informative center of the sentence; in cases of reverse actual division, the logical stress may indicate the rheme at the beginning of the utterance,

e.g.: Charlie (Th) is late (logical accent, Rh). - Charlie (logical accent, Rh) is late (Th).

In written speech the logical accent is represented by all the other rheme-identifying lingual means, which indicate its position directly or indirectly. They can be technically supported by special graphical means of rheme-identification, such as italics, bold type, underlinings, etc.

Actual division of the sentence finds its full expression only in a concrete context of speech, but this does not mean that the context should be treated as the factor which makes the speaker arrange the informative perspective of the sentence in a particular way. On the contrary, the actual division is an active means of expressing functional meanings and it is not so much context-governed as it is context-governing: it builds up concrete contexts out of constructional sentence models chosen to reflect different situations and events. Contextual relevance of actual division is manifested, in particular, in cases of contextual ellipsis; the elliptical sentence normally contains the most important part of the information, the rheme, while the theme is omitted, e.g.: Who is late today? – Charlie (Charlie is late today).

In 1950’s, Jan Firbas (1921-2000)started examining Mathesius’ idea of English being less susceptible to the theme-rheme articulation than Czech, and from the negative answer to this statement he developed his theory. As an Anglicist he wrote most of his papers in English, but the impossibility of the literal translation of aktuální členění into English forced him to introduce a new term for this phenomenon – the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP).

The axioms of J. Firbas’s theory are the following:

1. Every element that conveys meaning pushes the communication forward and is a carrier of communicative dynamism.

2. The degrees of communicative dynamism are relativedegrees of communicative importance by which the elements contribute to the development of communication.

3. The degrees of communicative dynamism are determined by the interplay (interaction) of the factors of FSPin the very moment of communication. Instead of simple bipartition (theme-rheme), Firbas introduced tripartition (theme-transition-rheme).

Firbas came to the conclusion that apart from word order, and apart from context and intonation, there is another factor – semantics – which plays an important role in FSP. He introduced a systematic examination of the following four factors of FSP:

linearity (word order)

semantics (dynamic semantic scales)

context (verbal, situational, experiential)

intonation (prosodic features)

It is the interplay or these four factors that determines the relative degrees of communicative dynamism carried by separate elements, and – in the end – determines their thematic, transitional, or rhematic character. In unimpaired communication, the above factors are present anyway (the first three in written communication, all of them in spoken communication), so the language user makes an advantage out of the necessity.

Linearity

The dog barked several times. The theme → rheme sequence is unmarked.

The SVO sequence is unmarked, e.g. I’ve readthe book.

The deviation fromthe theme → rheme sequence is marked

The deviation fromthe SVO, e.g. The book, I’ve read.

J. Firbas came to the conclusion that while in Czech, markedness is caused by the deviation from the theme → rheme sequence, in English, markedness is caused by the deviation from the grammatical word order. It is important to take into account that the carriers of communicative dynamism need not only be single words. The elements form hierarchic structures – units and fields. The above elements the dog, the book are noun phrases, representing one unit in the given field. A unit represented by a word in one language may be represented by a morpheme in another language

She was eating (theme – transition – rheme).

Jed-l-a (rheme – transition – theme).

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